The question first
Has anyone done any comparison of object render quality at various distances?... in particular, finding distances at which adjacent render quality settings look the same. e.g. at what distance does a very high quality render of a tree look the same as a high quality render of a tree?
I've done a bit more experimentation with population masking to make it more practical for large populations, reducing RAM usage *and* allowing for a larger FOV. I started from scratch with my building block approach, constructing 3 sets of masks to populations with identical locations/seeds/member objects but different render quality settings.
1: A global density map to define where and at what density I wanted the trees placed
2: A camera FOV map defining an area in which objects could potentially be in frame (based on the masking used in my high-res qtvr test)
3: A set of masks defining 3 separate sperical disance ranges from the camera
4: A set of masks combining each of 3 with 1.
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I ran a quick test using distances of 200m, 1km (just past the far edge of the nearest lake) and 20km, with a FOV of 75 degrees using the xfrog birch at 10m spacing.
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My camera angle was a little high so I didn't actually get any very high quality trees. The populations were 0, 2500 and 1.4 million and the whole lot, including 3 lakes, rendered in about 40 minutes (detail = 1, AA = 1, GI = 1,1), RAM usage peaked at 720Mb.
This looks very promising but I really need a more accurate idea of what distances to use for the different render quality settings, and also to check at what render quality reflectivity is dropped... so I thought I'd be lazy and ask if anyone else had tried this already
Once I have this I can start to guess just what sort of area I can populate..
